Books Read:
Dead to the World
The Life O’Reilly
Pet Peeves
Gods Behaving Badly
Truly, Madly
The Lovely Bones
Dead as a Doornail
Tainted
To read the reviews for these books, click here.

Pages Read: 2393

Bookmarks Given:
1. 0 Books
2. 2 Books
3. 2 Books
4. 2 Books
5. 1 Books
*There was one book I didn’t give a rating to because it was short stories.

Favorite Book: Tainted
Least Favorite Book: Dead as a Doornail

Giveaways:
I gave away Truly, Madly and had quite a few entries. The Duty of Love didn’t fare so well. No entries, but if you are interested, let me know. If I don’t hear anything by the weekend, I’ll give it to my church for the church book sale.

Goals for February:
1. Get some reading done for my 2010 Young Adult Reading Challenge
2. Finish up the books I have from publishers/borrowed/contests and read the ones I’ve bought
3. Read 9 books. That may be a stretch. I didn’t realize I read so many in January, but it’s a goal

Looking Forward to in February:
Starting the Private series and finishing the Sookie Stackhouse series.

Release: January 1, 2002

The Lovely Bones tells the story of Susie Salmon (like the fish). The young girl is walking home from school one day when a neighbor rapes and murders her. All that is found after she is killed is a book, a notebook and her elbow. Her father will stop at nothing to prove the killer is Mr. Harvey.

This book is told from Heaven by Susie. She travels around from her parents lives, to her brother and sister, to a couple of school friends, the lead detective on her case and of course Mr. Harvey.

When I first started reading this book, I absolutely loved it! It was gripping and I loved how Susie narrated it from her Heaven. But about halfway through, and years later, I started to lose interest. The extreme drama at the beginning dropped off, leaving me wanting more.

I know this book isn’t meant to be completely believable, your narrator is in Heaven. But towards the end, there is an “out of body” experience that wrapped up the story, but is very unbelievable. I was ok with traveling around with Susie because I don’t what it’s like in Heaven and don’t know who all is with us and how often, but coming back as someone else, is too much for me.

I really liked that Susie told her own story. And I really liked the idea of Heaven in this book. It got me thinking about what my Heaven would be like. What would be the main buildings, who would I hope to be with me?

This isn’t a book that I wanted to read until the movie came out and we wanted to see the movie. So, I didn’t have much expectations going into it. I had heard a lot of great things about it and while I loved how it was told and the beginning of the novel, it really didn’t do a whole lot for me.

I give The Lovely Bones, 2 bookmarks.

We plan on watching the movie soon, so I’ll be sure to compare and contrast, but I’m having a really hard time now figuring out how the movie will play off the book and work. I’ve heard the Susie narrates it all from Heaven like in the book, I’m just not sure if I’ll like it. We’ll wait and see.